A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine surrealist prose texts written in French, English, Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese, from the emergence of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, through the post-war and postmodern periods, and up to the contemporary moment. This approach extends received narratives regarding surrealism's geographical locations and considers its transnational movement and modes of circulation. Moreover, it challenges critical biases that have defined surrealism in predominantly masculine terms, and which tie the movement to the interwar or early post-war years. This book will appeal both to scholars and students of surrealism and its legacies, modernist literature, and the history of the novel.

In the surrealist revolt against the state, the Church, and the family, the mother figure became a key target, both as custodian of bourgeois-patriarchal values and as symbol of Catholic doctrine. In works such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or (1930), and Joyce Mansour’s Jules César (1955), mothers are attacked and violated, suffering a fate similar to those of the detested mother figures in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade. Yet not all mothers in surrealist art and literature are portrayed in such unequivocally negative terms. Focusing on Leonor Fini’s Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus (1976) and Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend (2004), this chapter traces an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is rendered more ambiguous and at times even invested with revolutionary potential. These novels, the chapter suggests, elaborate representations of maternity in critical dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As such they resonate to some extent with the (largely contemporaneous) work of French feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, in which the concept of maternity becomes configured as an alternative to the phallocentric symbolic order.

This chapter seeks to map the key feminist critiques of and debates around Surrealism in the 1970s and 1980s, after which point feminist Surrealist scholarship underwent a marked proliferation and, building on these earlier insights, developed in fresh and innovative directions. Focusing primarily on francophone and anglophone scholarship, this chapter aims to establish how these bodies of work both diverge from and overlap with each other, as well as to account for the ways in which they intersect with and contribute to broader contemporaneous cultural and theoretical debates.

This essay explores the concern in Dorothea Tannings work of the late 1960s and early 1970s with touch, contiguity, and the concept of maternity. In addition to a series of paintings and drawings that connote intimacy and whose titles allude to maternity, during this period Tanning also gave form to a group of soft sculptures, which similarly evince a preoccupation with closeness and touch, and indicate a form of intimacy that challenges the limits of the individual subject. Tannings engagement with these themes, the essay argues, resonates closely with the feminist poetics developed around the same time by poststructuralist theorists such as Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. I propose that Irigarays theories of maternity, subjectivity, and non-phallocentric language offer a particularly rich set of analytical tools with which to understand Tannings work. Through establishing the affinities between Tanning and Irigaray, I suggest, we can better understand the intellectual currents that flowed between poststructuralist feminism and surrealist womens work of this period.

Leonora Carrington’s surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet (written sometime in the 1950s but not published until 1974)¹ is at once a parodic quest narrative, a fictionalised transposition of Robert Graves’s 1948 study The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (which Carrington described as ‘the 2 greatest revelation’ of her life²) and a utopian vision of an ethics of being and knowing. Narrated by its whimsical, anecdote-prone and near-deaf protagonist, the ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, the novel chronicles six elderly women’s search for the Holy Grail in a nursing home for the aged. As Jonathan P. Eburne has observed,...